The Slowworm's Song by Andrew Miller

Author:Andrew Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Back at the garden centre today. Very quiet. People are on holiday and, anyway, they don’t want to plant much in August. Summer’s playing out. Most gardens just go their own way. Some roses bloom a second time. The unpicked courgettes turn into marrows. I arrived late and Tim said he needed to be able to depend on me and at the moment he couldn’t. He had noted my times of arrival since the spring. He said he didn’t want to start docking my pay but I was making things very difficult for him. Then, perhaps because he thought he’d gone too far, he said he knew there were problems and he didn’t want to be unkind. All this might have made sense if there’d been a queue at the till or a heap of boxes to unpack but there was nothing.

At home again the study was so full of the heat of the day’s sun I sat in my boxers and for an hour had a go at that Mill on the Floss essay for the OU. You know, it was your mother, one day in Bristol, who told me about the Open University. She encouraged me, and when I said it was above my head she said it wasn’t. It took me a long while to believe that!

It had a greater effect on my self-esteem, my self-respect, than anything I’d done since the day of my passing-out parade. I got a decent mark for my first essay, a nice letter to go with it. It was a revelation. And I kept it up for a while, but bit by bit fell back into old ways and bad habits, the thought that perhaps after all it wasn’t for me. Not too difficult, that wasn’t it. Hard to say what it was. Some fear of doing well, of having success. Of who might be deserving of that and who not.

Lord knows if anyone’s still waiting for this essay. I studied my notes, hoping to catch my thread again. At the bottom of the last page I had written down a quote, ‘The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before and not too damn much after.’ Nothing to say where it’s from or who it’s by. Anyway, I made no progress with the essay, unless opening the folder counts as progress.

I had a kip on the floor, just curled up on the rug, my folded T-shirt for a pillow. When I woke I went downstairs, drank water and ate a pot of strawberry yoghurt that was about to go past its best-before date. My head is so crammed with the past I sometimes have to hang on to things—the rumble of a tractor going past, the ache in my knees—to stop myself sliding down into it. If I don’t, you’ll come looking for me one day and I’ll be hidden behind a wall thirty years thick.

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